This weeks spotlight is on a company who'd prefer you shine some lasers their way instead.

RaveNectar is a creator and distributor of EDM-oriented, mind-numbingly complex clothing that fuses vibrant artwork with intense comfort.

Jordan Lejuwaan, who co-owns RaveNectar with his girlfriend Sandra Lam, built the company from home-made clothing, to a Kickstarter campaign, to a profitable business in the course of 8 months. Read on to learn more about Jordan's story and how he runs his business.

What did you do
before RaveNectar?

When I was at college and in the process of dropping out, I created
a successful blog/community site called HighExistence.com. It currently has 60-70 thousand members. I’ve
also been a part of starting a sustainable community outside of Montreal. The
goal was to create a community that is conducive to public well-being and that thrives
on lending, borrowing, and overall selfless participation in things for the welfare
and survival of the neighborhood. They currently inhabit 60+ acres and are thriving
and expanding.

What is RaveNectar?

RaveNectar is a crazy clothing company that prints the dazzling work
of independent artists ALL OVER clothing using sublimation printing.
Sublimation is the process of transposing designs from paper to clothing by
turning the ink into a gas using incredibly high heat. This allows for the
insanely vibrant colors that our clients are looking for.

What’s the pain
point that you address?

RaveNectar came to me a few years ago when looking for some crazy
clothing to wear to a music festival. I couldn’t find anything that was really
far enough “out there” that wasn’t
super
tacky and I have known others who had this same problem. There just wasn’t a
viable outlet. I wanted to bring crazy, yet beautiful clothing to people like
me.

How is selling to
this audience unique?

I think this is a common issue for online retail especially in the
clothing space: it lacks the physical aspect of traditional clothing shopping.

It’s easy for someone to see electronics and have an understanding of what they are getting. Or with physical clothes shopping, for them to say, “yes that design
works for me,” or, “no, this doesn’t fit right.” Clothes have to look good and
fit. When shopping for apparel online, there’s always that uncertainty.

What software /
tools do you use?

Platforms

Our store is built on
Shopify
and our blog is hosted on Wordpress. We’ve
found that, when it comes to sheer ease-of-use, Shopify was an easy choice.
There are other solutions out there that are more flexible, but their templates
and themes are awesome.

Marketing

We’ve been experimenting with
Adroll
for retargeting lately but advertising has not been nearly as effective for us
as word of mouth and social networking. Our networked users provide more
engaging leads than any advertising dollar has been able to give us yet.
Our niche is one of intense communal pride and association, so referrals are by
far our best marketing technique.

On-site we use
Justuno to
provide discount popups to users. They allow for time-sensitive popups, which
we use to promote deals and products. I’ve found that if someone has a coupon code they are 1,000
times (exaggeration) more likely to proceed to your check out.

Now, do they
convert? The shopping cart is an area we were seeing the highest number of
exits and abandonment. As a business owner it was incredibly frustrating to see,
so we are now using exit-intent targeting through Justuno to offer a discount as well
during checkout, just to nudge those people along.

When we offer the discount code, we use it as an opportunity to collect emails to build our list. The popup is still Justuno, but for the lists we use
MailChimp.

Customer Support

Currently Sandra handle's all of the customer support, which is made possible by using GrooveHQ, since you
can aggregate all of your emails, tweets, and Facebook posts into one portal. Definitely has the best UI out of all the
support apps (including Zendesk).

Reviews

Product reviews are essential to our referral-driven traffic. We use
Yotpo for
comment generation and moderation. One of the best things about it is sending
an email to your customer any number of days after purchase and allowing them
to review your product directly from the email.

It’s a simple, one-step
solution that generates hundreds of reviews for us (most of them 5-stars).
Yotpo reviews go straight to the product.
It’s an incredibly low-touch solution that works like a charm for us.

How does a
day of work at RaveNectar go?

We use a family-owned print shop in Boston that does printing and
fulfillment for us so I don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting.

My days, of late, have consisted of signing up for and testing
different analytics platforms to try them all out before deciding on one. It’s
nice because
Shopify has direct and easy
integration with all of them, so I don’t have to do much work getting them set
up.

Most of my time is dedicated to research and finding new
solutions to improve the business and sending out newsletters. When we release new products, my tasks are to take and edit product photos, upload them
to the site and design the look of the new homepage.

Sandra handles communication with our artists, customer support and the finances. She's an amazing business partner. They say don't go into business with your significant other, but I wouldn't run RaveNectar with anyone else.

How do you stay organized?

We use
Slack to communicate and ToDoist to create and share tasks. We have a
meeting every Monday to examine the results of the previous week and to set the
tasks for the coming week. Other than that, like I said, it’s pretty hands off.

Having ____ would
make running your business easier?

I would love a service that would connect us Anglophone retailers
with manufacturers and materials in foreign countries. If there’s a
sustainable, trustworthy service where textile distributors would negotiate
with an entity that handles translations and negotiations on your behalf, I
haven’t found it yet.

So much is lost in translation and you get ripped off when wholesale
materials distributors know you are from the US. A middleman who smoothes that
relationship would help us a ton.

Do you have any
quirks that make you
perfect for this
type of business?

In terms of ecommerce, I would say that my work ethic is key to my
success. I’m dedicated as anything to my business’ success and will put in any
amount of time to ensure it.

RaveNectar itself needs someone with an eye for design and an
understanding of the culture, both of which I have. Our clientele is
community-based and cohesive in their desire to share an experience, yet everyone is so unique
in their background and personalities. I have a predisposition towards communal
bonding and living for experiences.

(Not me in the image, but that's one of our shirts!)

I don’t succeed because I’m quirky, more
because I understand and associate with my audience. But really, everyone is
compatible with this crowd; they are such a fun-loving and receptive bunch.

If you could go
back in time to before RaveNectar, what advice would you give yourself?

Spend the extra time to find the
absolute lowest price for your
products and materials. It’s so much easier to run huge sales and give
discounts when you have more profit margins to work with.

What 3 pieces of
advice do you have for ecommerce entrepreneurs?

Test demand for product

Before your create anything, you need to test demand. Give yourself a landing
page, capture interest, and build a mailing list. Run FB and other ads to the landing page as if people can buy, and see if the click on a "Buy it Now" button to see if you're onto something.

Crowdfund if possible

You may not think you need Kickstarter or crowdfunding,
and you may well not. But, if there’s a chance it’s remotely applicable to your
business, do it no matter what. For starters, it’s great exposure, gives you
pre-release demand, and gives you a solid lump of capital to work with without
offering any equity.

Dive in

Don’t worry that you don’t know something, you don’t need
to know everything and you will learn as you go. I certainly didn’t when I
began and I’m still learning every day. You can be successful without having
your head fully wrapped around something.